Re: Glottal stops (was: B. Cthia and Nom) Saul Epstein Mon, 28 Apr 1997 23:25:11 -0500 From: McReynolds Date: Monday, April 28, 1997 5:23 PM > Saul Epstein wrote: >> >> My dialect pronounces the above words as [badl] and [haspIdl], so >> there's another variation. Even though English has a /t/ phoneme and a >> /d/ phoneme, some occurences of [d] are allophones of /t/, and vice >> versa. The word "voiced" is usually pronounced [voist]. > > You wouldn't be from the southwest, would you? I live in Texas, and I > pronounce things just as you said above. Not really vital to the > discussion, but I thought it was neat how they corresponded. Southwest corner of the Midwest, actually: Kansas City. But those pronunciations are pretty generalized. I just said "my dialect" so I wouldn't get cries of "speak for yourself," as I might if I just referred to it as "American English." I would have expected someone from Texas to say [vost] or [vo^st] for "voiced." Interesting. > I think that we should take given words and names from > the books and shows (such as Spock, T'Pring, etc.) as Federation > transliterations of the words, and not the actual spelling in the Vulcan > Romanized alphabet. This would likely be a useful approach. > For instance, the word K't'inga (a Klingon starship > class) is actually written as {qItI'nga} in {tlhIngan Hol}. The {'}s in > the English version are simply what some Federation guy wrote down when > he heard "kih-tih-ngah." I would write T'Pring as {tIpring} or perhaps > {tI'pring}. We should spell the words how the actors pronounce them, > not how the script has it written. Or at least how the actors playing Vulcans pronounce them... > Just because the name is written > like "T'Pring" in a book written in English does not mean it is > pronounced as {t-glottal stop-pring} by Vulcans, and as such should be > written as pronounced. Right. But is it [t^pring] or [tpring]? And, while I think that if anyone could successfully implement phonetic spelling it would be Vulcans, phonemic and morphological spellings have their own logic. I'm not sure things should always be written as pronounced, especially if we consider how long a particular writing system has been in use... > I think it is highly unlikely that a glottal > stop would be used between two consonants without a vowel stuck in > there, and that is a change I would make to the lexicon. It certainly FEELS "wrong" to me as the speaker of a language that only uses glottal stops to make vowels more distinct in certain environments. But I doubt such things are beyond the Terran articulatory organs, let alone the Vulcan. > The {'} should > eitehr be used as a glottal stop OR a syllable boundary, but not as > both. I'm having very similar problems with the apostrophe, what determines its inclusion in a word, and what it represents. I'm reminded of the original schwa, the "vowel" in Hebrew represented (when vowels are written) by something like a subscript colon -- a vertical row of two dots below the preceding consonant. Its pronunciation varies depending on the consonants it comes between. If the consonants form a permissible cluster, the schwa is not pronounced at all. If the consonants do not form a permissible cluster, the schwa is pronounced as just the barest hint of an indistinct vowel: the shortest vowel you can manage with your tongue on its way from the first consonant to the second. The apostrophe after a consonant in Vulcan seems to be performing the same function. But after a vowel it seems to be acting as a legitimate glottal stop. If we don't tie them together into a phoneme, I agree that we should come up with a different symbol for one of them. The distribution seems to look something like this: /'/ = { [^']/ C_V; ['] / _V,V_; [^] / C_C } (/phoneme/ = { [allophones] / environments }; C is any consonant, V is any vowel.) Since this is a construction, we'll just have to decide whether <'> represents one sound-idea pronounced differently in different contexts, or whether it has been used for two different sound-ideas which each deserve their own symbol. If we had a Vulcan to work with, we could have her pronounce a whole bunch of words until we saw the pattern. But we have a limited number of words, and we'll be responsible for creating more AND deciding how all of them are actually pronounced. Perhaps when next we hear from Professor Zvelebil, he can help us understand what he meant by the <'>. Or perhaps Marketa knows? I've basically reached the limits of determinacy on this one... -- from Saul R. Epstein Terran, Late 20th-Early 21st Century liberty uit net www johnco cc ks us sepstein posse circumuertutus libertas satis est